The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia…Or Is It Eurasia?

Current US China policy seems to be “Who Needs Russia?We’ve got…The
Philippines!”

Unless President Obama has absolute faith in the ability of
the United States and the Asian democracies to restrain the PRC, there would
seem to be some disturbing developments for the United States in Asia.

First of all, the People’s Republic of China parked its HYSY
981 oil rig in waters that Vietnam claims as its Exclusive Economic Zone, triggering
a heated response from Vietnam, anguished writhing from ASEAN, and a stern “don’t
engage in provocations” fingerwag from the United States.

The PRC, however, is not yielding, implicitly highlighting
the fact that the United States is failing in its self-proclaimed mission to
assure peace and prosperity in the South China Sea (as I pointed out in a
previous piece, the PRC’s oil-rig shenanigans accentuate the essential sovereignty/EEZ
character of disputes between China and its South China Sea neighbors, and
undercut the “freedom of navigation” hobbyhorse that the US has crafted to ride
to the rescue of the SCS).

Although VOA reported it as “US Navy ‘Shaping Events’ in
South China Sea”, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert
acknowledged that the US has its work cut out for it in the SCS:

“We are starting to
shape events. We have got to manage our way through this, in my opinion,
through this East China Sea and South China Sea [tensions]. We’re not
leaving. They know that. They would be the leadership of the Chinese navy. We
believe that we have to manage our way through this."

Also, this week also witnessed a slobbery authoritarian
love-fest between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping at a confab in Shanghai, also
attended by Iran and a bunch of stans, illustrating the completely predictable
dynamic of the Western hardline on Ukraine driving Russia and its gas into the
arms of the PRC.

As of this writing the gas deal has not gotten done,
apparently because of a disagreement over the unit price, and because the PRC
is jibbing at the Russian demand for a $25 billion prepayment—a prepayment
that, I might add, will relieve Gazprom of the financial embarrassment incurred
by shipping Ukraine a few billion dollars of gas that it hasn’t been paid for, provide
a nice receivable (if not immediate cash cushion) for Russia as it haggles with
Ukraine (and a rather anxious Europe) re the next round of gas shipments to the
West, and establish a precedent for demanding prepayment for Ukraine.

If the gas deal doesn’t go down, the US foreign policy
commentariat in general and the Obama administration in particular will breathe
a quiet sigh of relief that the dreaded Eurasian alliance of ex-Commies and
pseudo-Commies in Russia and China has failed to occur.

If the gas deal gets done, especially on the basis of a
ruble/yuan settlement that sidelines the dollar, on the other hand, the manure
should hit the fan.

Right now, the Western response to these Asian developments
has been pretty muted, a sign, I think that the foreign policy consultant/think
tank/media complex has not received any useful guidance from the Obama administration.

My personal feeling is that the United States is loath to acknowledge
the Eurasian “ghost at the banquet” and is declining to escalate openly at the
current awkward juncture.Instead, the
Obama administration is quietly rolling out a sequence of passive-aggressive reproofs
to the PRC.

Last week the USN Blue
Ridge just happened to cruise past the Scarborough Shoal.

This week, the Justice Department indicted 5 PLA officers
for hacking US corporations.

This sort of thing was always in the cards.Starting in 2011, the Obama administration had
been methodically rolling out the PRC cyber-bad-guy product for over a year, to
be capped by a formal direct confrontation with Xi Jinping by Barack Obama
concerning Chinese cybersins at Sunnylands in June 2013, followed by some
public naming and shaming, but then Boom!Snowden!Doh!

The Snowden thing seems to have derailed the campaign for a
year or so—most of the hacking allegations in the DOJ indictment date to 2012
or before, an indication that the United States is belatedly working off its
depreciated pre-Snowden inventory of PRC misbehavior.

In rolling out the indictments yesterday, Attorney General
Eric Holder was obliged to abandon the pre-Snowden framing—that PRC hacking was
a Defcon 1 threat both to the US economy and the global Internet commons—in favor
of condemning the PRC hackers for the one kind of hacking that the United
States government still asserts it does not do…corporate spying…for corporate
advantage.

In context, I should point out that the United States has an
unequivocal agenda of espionage on economic matters pertaining to energy, since
energy is a matter of “national security”.As to whether the information on potentially unfavorable developments in
oil, gas, and uranium is simply put into a dossier for President Obama to wring
his hands over, or whether actionable intelligence somehow makes it to
pro-Western energy giants, is something that I and the reader can currently
only speculate about.

However, it will be interesting if Glenn Greenwald comes up
with any blockbuster revelations concerning Brazil, its over the top anxiety
concerning the security and secrecy of the bidding process for its massive “deep
salt” offshore oil blocs (first award included Total & two PRC companies), Brazil’s
stated desire to disconnect from the US Internet, and any US NSA/CIA hijinks.

Also, I might point out that, in the founding document of
the pivot, “America’s Pacific Century” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
defined US “economic security” as “national security”, which would conceivably
place a broader range of corporate information into the purview of the CIA and
NSA.

A look at the indictment seems to indicate that the US
wanted to make sure its threat to prosecute looked credible, and not be
hamstrung by US corporations’ unwillingness to air matters pertaining to vital
proprietary knowledge or the loss thereof in open court.

Many of the hacking infractions pertained to US firms that were
involved in various trade disputes with the PRC on issues like solar panels,
steel, and whatnot and already involved extensive declarations of fact before
the WTO.

The US grand jury returned the sealed indictment on May 1
and the Department of Justice exercised its discretionary powers to unseal the
indictment on May 19; in other words, the timing was a matter of choice by the
Obama administration.I suspect it was a
squib fired across the PRC’s bow in response to the PRC’s defiance in the SCS
and its romance with Russia.

The PRC has responded with spluttering denials, suspension
of a working group on cybersecurity, and threats of a chill in
military-to-military ties.

The Obama administration’s move doesn’t seem to have much of
an upside; it scotched the joint US-PRC work on groundrules in cyberwarfare,
something that I think is of genuine interest to the Pentagon if not the
keyboard commandoes of the national security apparatus; it also threatens
military-to-military exchanges, again a priority for the military, which
cherishes interactions with opposing commanders it may be called upon to
confront or fight; and it provides very little consolation for US high tech businesses
like Cisco, which are reeling from the public revelation of their intimate
games of footsie with the NSA.

Needless to say, the indictment also did nothing to advance
what should be the sin qua non of
superpower geopolitics: trying to drive a wedge between the PRC and Russia by highlighting
differences in treatment.But instead of
stroking Xi Jinping, we gave him a whack on the snout at the same time we’re
pummeling Putin.

That is, it would seem, rather stupid, since Russia is wary
of PRC economic dominance, especially in the Siberian east, fears the
demographic onslaught of the “Yellow Horde”, and is not an automatic and
natural ally of China.

Nevertheless, “Eurasia” is now becoming a thing, and that’s
not very good news for the pivot to Asia.The pallid multilateralism of the pivot, I must confess, does not
compare favorably to the muscular posturing of red strongmen that makes the
hearts of neo-nationalists, particularly in Russia, go pitty-pat.

The premise of the pivot—that an ostensible united front of
the US and Asian democracies will impel the PRC to modify its behavior to
adhere to desired Western norms—is taking a hit along with the optics.

As the relative weight of the US and Europe in the world
economy diminish, US sanctions encourage disintermediation of the US financial
system in the world economy, the US pursues an ineffectual but polarizing all-stick/zero-carrot
confrontation with Russia at the very time it is seeking to isolate the PRC
diplomatically, and “Eurasia” looks more viable, the PRC’s willingness to bear
the cost of defying US soft power increases.

Don’t get me wrong.PRC aggressiveness in the South China Sea is real.Problem is, the US will to confront the PRC in
the SCS is not.The Rube Goldberg
structure of the pivot announces that fact instead of hiding it.

As the deterrent effect of US soft power in Asia dwindles,
the US must decide whether to force developments in Asia into the sphere in
which it still exercises unquestioned dominance—the hard power of military
action—or resign itself to an ineluctable erosion of US prestige and influence
in the region and a retreat to bilateral horsetrading with the unpalatable “Eurasian”
powers.

It will also be interesting to see if America recognizes
that it has a choice, albeit from an unattractive menu of options.But if the Western spin of the Ukraine crisis is
any guide, the US will console itself with the fantasy that it is merely
reacting passively to aggression, the pivot was forced on it, and the PRC can
be blamed for the unwise choices that Washington made.

The U.S. is not in the business of acknowledging it made bad
foreign policy, even though it has made spectacularly bad foreign policy during
the Obama as well as Bush administrations.The usual temptation is to blame incapable proxies and venal antagonists
for crises exacerbated by the United States.

For a useful illustration, I direct readers to the case of
Libya, where the US & NATO destroyed the governing authority, handed the
reins over to groups totally incapable of exercising power, and are now apparently
backing a coup by an ineffectual strongman who just might make things right;
the cavalcade of bloody disaster that is US policy in Syria; the botch in
Ukraine; and, for that matter, the massacre and misery of Iraq.And I almost forgot the disaster that the
US-midwifed regime of South Sudan has become.And how about Yemen?

Either the
US is rather maladroit practitioner of foreign policy, or failure is displaying
an inexplicable bias for dogging American actions.

For a classic specimen of US bewilderment at the pickle it’s
in, I direct you to “China’s Grand Strategy Disaster” by Brad Glosserman of
CSIS.He is genuinely gobsmacked that
the PRC cannot perceive the subtle genius of the pivot, which is so evident
from the privileged perspective of the Washington Beltway.Must be collective terror and/or insanity in
the PRC ruling elite:

Why, then, does China stick to this
course? Either no one in the upper echelons of the Chinese leadership sees the
big picture—which is a very disturbing scenario—or no one in that leadership is
prepared to question the wisdom of current policies, because the price of
dissent is potentially too high. If true, that should be extremely worrying.
That logic implies the momentum of current decisions cannot be diverted and
confrontation, if not clashes, will follow.

There is only one convincing
explanation for Chinese behavior: Beijing is trying to harvest a new source of
energy to fuel its economy—capturing the power generated by Deng Xiaoping as he
spins in his grave.

You know, I’m not sure a diagnosis of collective insanity in
Zhongnanhai is really going to reassure President Obama that the pivot to Asia
is the magic elixir for America’s “Pacific Century”.

There is, of course, another convincing explanation: that
the PRC thinks it has enough regional clout to avoid catastrophic long term
consequences from the transitory distaste of its neighbors and US for its
policies, just as the United States feels it can shove its Ukraine policy down
the throats of Germany and the EU.

For the US in Asia, I predict a choice off the
confrontation/accommodation menu of “both and neither”, escalating but
indecisive sanctions and military posturing, a mish-mash of soft power and hard
power antagonism, i.e. an era of ugly and counterproductive muddling.Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.

4 comments:

China's position in all of this is as clear and natural as the US position in Central America... What is strange is the American idea of being world hegemon. If the USA continues on this path it will bleed itself white, rather like Spain once did.

Tom Engelhart wrote this the other day:

"(...) As a rising power in the nineteenth century, the U.S. moved toward global status on the basis of an ambitious program of canal building and then of government-sponsored transcontinental railroads. Jump a century and a half and the country that, until recently, was being called the planet’s “sole superpower” has yet to build a single mile of high-speed rail. Not one. Even a prospective line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which looked like it might be constructed, is now blocked coming and going.

If, however, you happen to be looking for a twenty-first century rising power that has put its money on the American (rail)road to success, check out China. When Chinese state expenditures are discussed in the U.S., the American concern is always military spending (definitely on the rise), but China’s domestic spending on high-speed rail is staggering. As of 2012, the country already had a 10,000-kilometer network, including the longest line in the world, and it’s expected to hit 15,000 kilometers by the end of 2015, not to speak of -- as Pepe Escobar notes today -- high-speed “silk roads” that could, in the end, reach across Eurasia. Someday, if Chinese engineering dreamers are to be believed, there might even be a two-day 8,000-mile line from Beijing via the longest underwater tunnel ever built through Canada to the United States."

The path described above is the one that made America strong and the path that America is following today is the one that leads to the ash heap of empires.